TEDxTUM -Dora Dzvonyar Organizer

Hacking the Red Circle

Dora Dzvonyar is the Organizer for TEDxTum (Technical University Munich) in Germany. She's been organizing since 2015 and has several events and produced Salons including a TEDxLive event. There are 40,000 students at TUM which is bigger than some of the towns that provide a TEDx event. She's a grad student and teacher. She watches one TED talk a day and saw an announcement about a TEDx in a flyer and took the leap to be an organizer and never looked back. One of the significant challenges for them has been establishing a structure for the event that transcends the transient nature of being a student-run organization. They now have six team leaders, that are Ph.D.'s who are going to be around, this stable core of people is able to work well with the flexibility of the primary workforce. This is an excellent solution for a University TEDx event. An interesting anomaly that exists as a cultural consideration for the team is that in Germany, outgoing persona's are frowned upon. Everyone, especially students, wants to be perceived as serious. They encourage a playful atmosphere to counter this behavior. When I asked her about the intrinsic awards of running a TEDx she said that if one person says, "I think differently," it's all worth it. I agree. Dora says that she gets a lot of ideas for her event from this podcast, thanks, we love hearing that.